Maxwell, JAMES CLERK-, one of the greatest of modern natural philosophers, was the only son of John Clerk-Maxwell of Middlebie, in Dumfries-shire, and was born at Edinburgh, June 13, 1831. He was educated in boyhood at the Edinburgh Academy. His first published scientific paper was read for him by Professor Forbes to the Royal Society of Edinburgh before he was fifteen. He spent three years at the university of Edinburgh; and during this period he wrote two valuable papers, 'On the Theory of Rolling Curves,' and 'On the Equilibrium of Elastic Solids.' He went to Cambridge in 1850, obtained in 1854 the position of second wrangler, and was declared equal with the senior wrangler in the higher ordeal of the Smith's prize. In 1856 he became a professor in Marischal College, Aberdeen, and in 1860 in King's College, London. He had been successively Scholar and Fellow of Trinity, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Trinity when he finally became in 1871 professor of Experimental Physics in the university of Cambridge. He died November 5, 1879.
The great work of his life is his treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (2 vols. 1873). His great object was to construct a theory of electricity in which 'action at a distance' should have no place; and his success was truly wonderful. There can be little doubt that he succeeded in laying the basis of a physical theory of electric and magnetic phenomena, quite as securely founded as is the undulatory theory of light (see Nature, vol. vii. p. 478). Another subject to which he devoted much attention was the perception of colour, the three primary colour-sensations, and the cause of colour-blindness. He was the first to make colour-sensation the subject of actual measurement. He obtained the Adams prize for his splendid discussion of the dynamical conditions of stability of the ring-system of Saturn. But he was perhaps best known to the public by his investigations on the kinetic theory of gases. His Bradford 'Discourse on Molecules' is a classic in science. Besides a great number of papers on various subjects, mathematical, optical, dynamical, he published an extraordinary text-book of the Theory of Heat and an exceedingly suggestive little treatise on Matter and Motion. In 1879 he edited, with copious and very valuable original notes, The Electrical Researches of the Hon. Henry Cavendish. He took a prominent part in the construction of the British Association Unit of Electrical Resistance, and in the writing of its admirable reports on the subject; and he discovered that viscous fluids, while yielding to stress, possess double refraction. He was excessively ingenious in illustration, especially by means of diagrams, and possessed a singular power of epigrammatic versification. Some of his last and very best scientific work adorns and enriches the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was, in the full sense of the word, a Christian. His Scientific Papers were edited by W. D. Niven (8 vols. Camb. 1890); and his Life has been written by Lewis Campbell and William Garnett (1882).